Just to be clear (and on reflection, my post wasn't), I was referring to other forums re: rabid fans defending the actions of whatever OEM. Not so here. Here, the community tends to be far more even-keeled. I will edit that post to clarify. Thanks for pointing that out.

I really like the feel of 11.2 UI. Very nice job! And double points for defaulting to dark template.

And now some critique/questions/suggestions..1:
Being able to edit the layout of the dashboard would be great. Since it kind of has that look, when i first logged in i immediately thought "oooo sweet customizable dashboard!", and tried to find the spot where the cursor turns into the 4 way pointer, or even the 2 way pointer

2:
This one really confuses the **** out of me actually.. Maybe its just a bug? But for me under Storage -> Pools, everything starts off collapsed and there is no "expand all" button (as far as i can tell).. why!?

And just as a QoL thing, it would be nice if clicking on the dataset name would also expand/collapse them. Instead of just the arrow.

3:
It would be super if this showed usable free space, and not the physically free space.. i still don't understand why i would care about unusable "free" space lol

Newbie

Sorry if this was mentioned before, but one thing that bugged me is that the Pool widget on the Dashboard does not show how much space is consumed (either by number comparison or % free or used - anything!).

I've been using the system for a few years now and have built my system up a little at a time. I don't use a lot of the bells and whistles preferring to use separate vm's for that kind of thing, so I am only using it as a NAS. I probably wouldn't be considered a typical user as my unit now has 33 disks in it. I have them separated into 4 RAIDZ1 sets with 6 disks each, the remainder of the drives are USB and are used as a backup of the data on the RAID volumes just in case. After 4 years of constant use, power outages, drive failures and user errors I have to say the system has been nothing but ROCK SOLID and I haven't lost a single ounce of data. I believe that following the hardware suggestions of others in the forum is probably the reason I've had such a good experience.

Every once in a while I check out the progress on the new UI, and I'm encouraged with what I see as it is going. I do get errors on the dashboard about missing rrd info on at least one of the drives and it can't find "summary" for the network.general but overall it is looking nice. Some things don't give quite as much information as the old UI, however it may just be in a different location and I haven't found it yet.

My GUI suggestion though comes due to the number of disks I have. When I go to reporting and look through the graphs I get 296 pages of 5 on graphs. Navigating this is impossible, it is a long list of graphs to scroll down through in the old UI but at least it was on 1 page. There needs to be a way to consolidate the graphs down so you can scroll through and get an idea of what is happening. Some ideas might be a way to filter for all graphs pertaining to a disk or a pool. Maybe a way to filter for graphs by function as well. I would like to see a grid view rather than a list. For example all the graphs for a disk on a row with a row for each disk and then group them by pool with filters so you could turn on/off graphs you don't want to see at the moment. This would make smaller graphs where you could drill in to a single graph for a more detailed look.

Newbie

Just started using the new UI for about a week. I won't be making a lengthy post right now, but the most important observations are these:

Dashboard displays the amount of free space, which would be useful if it actually displayed the right amount. Right now it displays the free space without taking pool parity into consideration. My "4TiB" free is actually 2.1TiB after parity. So right now this dashboard info is useless.

On that subject... WHY for the love of everything holy does the 'Pools' page display the pool size in TiB but the dataset size in TB?! Numbers become completely unreliable in this UI.

When an item is expanded in the left hand menu that needs an alternate color as well, to distinguish it from the rest of the menu.

The new shell is a major improvement, but I have yet to discover how to paste commands into this shiny new window.

The theme designer is honestly a great addition and very good first step to having a custom UI.

Lastly I agree with many others here that the UI wastes a lot of space. The previous UI was arguably too small and compact for modern standards, but the new UI takes it to the other extreme. There has to be a middle ground somewhere.

FreeNAS Experienced

I haven't read many of the previous messages in this thread, but has anybody mentioned the speed? I found it painfully slow when I was trying to select snapshots to delete. I went back to the legacy interface.

FreeNAS Experienced

I did the upgrade only from few days.
Till now only the new ui hangs and attemt to reconnect to the server. It is not a big issue becuse after 2-3 seconds it connect again with the server.
Any way to customize the dashboard elememnts or create sub dashboards?

As a new FreeNAS user the first thing I did was to blink 10 times, figure out how to switch to the old GUI and immediately felt comfortable. Then, before posting a rant about the plague of "graphic artists" pretending to understand user interface design and leading to Windows 8-10 Metro crap, I have read the 16 pages of this thread (and a previous one) to understand what the current status was.

Apparently, ~2 years after, the biggest issues which are also the simplest have not changed a iota. Why is there half an inch wasted space between every single line ? Wouldn't it take a couple days to develop a font selector and a padding field in the settings ? I have only 5 disks for now and I already can't see the information I need on my 1920x1080 20" screen . What's the timeline for:

Ability to change the current half-an-inch padding around every piece of text, field, columns and lines (this itself would solve 50% of all rants)

Switch from "Field under Label" to "Field next to Label" (Did someone notice that screens are mostly horizontal ?)

Ability to auto-save the columns setup in a cookie or something (if not in the profile). Currently we *can* see some useful information by resizing/adding columns, but it's lost on every connection... what's the use of even allowing it if not saving it ?

I really got the point about why there is a new GUI. What I don't understand is why the redesign made it so different. If it was motivated by a technology change, then staying close to the old design would have been logical. Also, I agree that functionality cannot be the only driver and that visual attractiveness is important.... but not at the expense of functionality. I'm still puzzled by the nonsense of having bigger and bigger screens, higher and higher resolutions while at the same time less and less information.

FreeNAS Guru

Apparently, ~2 years after, the biggest issues which are also the simplest have not changed a iota. Why is there half an inch wasted space between every single line ? Wouldn't it take a couple days to develop a font selector and a padding field in the settings ? I have only 5 disks for now and I already can't see the information I need on my 1920x1080 20" screen . What's the timeline for:

I try not to be negative but this is pretty bang on, the new one is just such a space hog :/
It's come a long way - it's now relatively usable - however if I'm in 'panic mode' and wanting to focus and check something (snapshots for example) I instantly go to the old UI.